Investment Performance April - August 2012 (-2.28%)

I'm catching up on our monthly stock investing reports. I've been delinquent since about March when I got a new work laptop without MS Excel and wasn't able to update my existing Excel tracking spreadsheet.

I tried to create a Google spreadsheet to handle, but found the function to pull stock quotes didn't give me the control I needed so things languished until I was able to get MS Excel back on my system. Now I'm catching up.

This report covers April-August stock transactions.

April-August Highlights:

This 5 month period was ugly for my personal portfolio. The market was up slightly over the time, but our portfolio performed much worse than our benchmark. We saw a -2.28% decline in our portfolio compared to our VTI benchmark decrease of 0.87%.
I've now been tracking our monthly investment performance for 4 years and recently posted an analysis of long term investment performance. I'm still mulling over what actions to take from the review, but likely will be moving more of our investments into Vanguard's Total Stock Market Index as a result. I still feel compelled to manage at least a portion of our portfolio as I view becoming an above average investor an important component to being financially free.
The only major investment we made was additional investments in Genworth as I see the stock a compelling long term investment.
We made our regular monthly investments in our Roth IRAs and Conocco Philips DRIP, and had some dividends and dividend reinvestments.
Our recent monthly returns were: Jan 09 -4.98%, Feb -9.94%, Mar +8.45%, Apr +10.88%, May +4.65%, Jun +0.89%, Jul +9.94%, Aug +4.36%, Sept 3.15%, Oct -2.34%, Nov +5.83%, Dec +1.85%, Jan '10 -2.34%, Feb +2.25%, Mar +5.88%, Apr +2.54%, May -8.13%, June -5.64%, July 6.17%. Aug -4.87%, Sept +8.48%, Oct 2.47%, Nov -0.96%, Dec +8.01%, Jan 2011 +2.06%, Feb 2.57%, Mar +0.15%, Apr +3.04%, May -1.56%, June -1.63%, July -2.71%, Aug -5.42%, Sept -7.06%, Oct +9.88%, Nov -0.39%, Dec +2.10%, Jan '12 +4.03%, Feb +4.68%, Mar +2.35%, Apr -1.74%.....

April-August 2012 Investment Report:

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